Point of View

The novel is told in the third person, past tense, with an omniscient narrator, from the perspective of the protagonist, Arthur Maxley. The use of Arthur’s point of view to the exclusion of the points of view of all the other characters is a technique which serves to draw the reader into Arthur’s obsessive state of mind: just as Arthur is unable to gain a wider perspective on the world because of his obsessive preoccupation with his own state of mind, so the reader is unable to form a wider understanding of the other characters and circumstances of the novel, because the available information is always limited to whatever is going on in Arthur’s head at any given moment.

The limitations of Arthur’s point of view are especially apparent in his interactions with women: the reader is, for example, given no...